If a venture studio provides a bunch of resources to help with marketing, gtm strategy, software development, finance, etc, do they have all of these people in-house? Or do they partner with other companies and agencies? Where do they get all their manpower from?
Curious venture studios work provide all this expertise.
(I realize quality varies widely and a lot of them probably don’t live up to their billing. I’m just asking about the logisitics of how they provide their service.)
Usually there are some trusted on premises folks to work with founders and lead teams. Those teams are overseas. Source: I did that.
I can provide some solid answers - most have “trusted vendors” that provide these resources. They have vetted experts, etc that they can point you to and subsidize or wholly pay for (often transparently). Source - I am such a vendor.
The VC’s I work with have a network of hired guns with different strengths…we come in, do work, and leave…
There are different ways of structuring a venture studio but a popular way is to build a “core team” that works on initial ideas, develops the MVPs and launches the projects. Everything should be handled in-house and not outsourced, otherwise it defies the point of having a venture studio in the first place. Your goal should be to build internal expertise to leverage for each new idea, then some dev work can be outsourced but still managed internally.
Depends.
Lots of correct answers here but I’ve also experienced venture studios that use some of their equity stake to hire high caliber in house resources as part of comp to work on the projects.
I worked at the very first venture studio. Happy to answer any questions. Yes we had a pretty robust and experienced design team, marketing team, etc. I was a brand designer. We occasionally contracted certain elements but mostly handled it all in house. I worked with 2-4 of our portfolio companies simultaneously at any given time.
Central services will typically be full time in-house staff with long tenure. That will cover recurring support needed for all companies in the studio. Typically that’s back office (finance, HR, etc) and common product related functions (e.g. product management, marketing, maybe engineering if the studio builds tech ventures). For anything more specialized, a good studio will have a range of trusted vendors/partners that it can pull in as needed for shorter mandates. Often there are also trusted vendors for the post-studio transition (e.g. fractional CFO to go with the new company once it spins out of the studio).